Edgar Allan Poe in New York City
Edgar Allen Poe cottage in the Bronx, NY. © The Bronx Historical Society
Around Halloween each year, I'm reminded of the works of Edgar Allan Poe. In high school English class, we were given the assignment of writing a college-style term paper. As part of the assignment, we were expected to visit the library of a local university to learn how to locate books, gather notes, and create an outline for the paper due later in the semester. I distinctly remember sitting at a desk among the library's bookshelves and reading Poe's The Masque of the Red Death. I researched Poe's use of imagery and symbolism throughout his popular works. His macabre texts still pull me into his dark and mysterious world. Recently, I listened to a podcast on Poe's life within New York City by historical duo The Bowery Boys (named after a 19th century New York gang). Here's a few facts I learned from listening and some further research on his life.
Born in Boston in 1809, Poe was raised in Richmond, V.A., and later moved to New York to find work. Though he spent portions of his life in Baltimore, Philadelphia and Richmond, Poe kept returning to New York. The Poe family lived in several neighborhoods including Greenwich Village, the Lower East Side, and in lower Manhattan near the present-day Financial District. In 1844 the family moved to the Brennan farmhouse in today's Upper West Side. Here, Poe worked on his poem The Raven, published in January of 1845. He frequently visited a nearby rocky area he named 'Mount Tom' which can still be seen in present-day Riverside Park. In May of 1846, Poe moved his family to Fordham village (located in the Bronx today) to find seclusion and cheap rent. He befriended the local Jesuit monks at St. John's College (now Fordham University, my alma mater). Poe's wife, Virginia Clemm, died here in 1847 from consumption, or tuberculosis. The Poe cottage survived and is now a museum located in Poe Park.
Poe died in Baltimore on October 7, 1849. The facts surrounding his death are mysterious and the exact cause of death is still unknown. He left Richmond on September 27 on his way to Philadelphia for work, but never made it there. On October 3, Baltimore Sun compositor Joseph W. Walker discovered Poe lying in the gutter outside Gunnar's Hall, a public house which was being used as a polling place for an election. Poe was semi-conscious and wearing dirty second-hand clothes. The night before he died, Poe's doctor said he kept repeating the name "Reynolds". The death certificate states the cause as swelling of the brain but no information has surfaced about how Poe ended up in the gutter outside the public house or where he'd been for the week before Walker found him.
Many theories exist, including that Poe may have drank himself to death. Another theory is that Poe was a victim of cooping, a method of voter fraud whereby gangs would beat and force people into voting for a candidate multiple times under different identities. This could explain why he was found wearing second-hand clothes outside the public house.
The Poe Museum in Richmond, V.A. explains Poe's legacy on American writing:
one of the most influential writers of the 19th Century and the first to try to make a living solely as a writer.
transformed the horror genre and was also an early pioneer of science fiction.
credited with inventing the modern detective story with Murders in the Rue Morgue and the concept of deductive reasoning, thus influencing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.
KW
Sources:
https://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2017/10/edgar-allan-poe-new-york-places-master-gloom-horror-made-mark.html
https://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2020/01/raven-edgar-allan-poe-published-170-years-ago-today-2.html
http://bronxhistoricalsociety.org/poe-cottage/history-of-the-cottage/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Allan_Poe
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/still-mysterious-death-edgar-allan-poe-180952936/
https://www.eapoe.org/index.htm
https://www.poemuseum.org/poes-biography